Tag: Seattle

I figure international news includes the United States. There’s a pretty even split between stories from other countries and national stories, presented so the public might know a little better what’s happening of interest to people in the trans community.

Poland

Anna Grodzka, 57, became the first ever Polish lawmaker to have had sex reassignment…which makes her the only current transsexual national legislator on the planet. Spain’s Carla Antonelli is transgender, but has not had sex reassignment surgery.

Grodzka runs Trans-Fuzja (website is in Polish), a foundation which supports Poland’s transpeople and says she decided to run in order to promote the work of the foundation. She won 19,451 in the Krakow II electoral district, making her the top vote-getter for Palikot’s Movement in that district and thereby winning one of the 460 seats in Poland’s lower house, the Sejm.

The world’s first transsexual MP was Georgina Beyer of New Zealand’s Labour Party, from 1999 until she resigned her seat in 2007.

Today, Poland is changing. I am the proof along with Robert Biedron, a homosexual and the head of an anti-homophobia campaign who ran for office in Gdynia.

–Anna Grodzka

Grodzka says that the time has come for sexual minorities to enjoy equal rights in Poland.

Enough of this concealing of the truth. This group of people, even if small, has its rights and they should be respected. They should not be pushed into oblivion.

On her to-do list are legal partnerships, job security, and state funding of sex change procedures.

SEATTLE — A man has died after being shot in the head in the city’s Leschi neighborhood on Wednesday night.

Police said the victim was sitting in a car with two others when he got into an argument with another man. That man went into a home in the 800 block of 32nd Avenue South, came back out with a gun and opened fire around 8:30 p.m.

The suspected gunman fled the scene, detectives said, and is believed to have run inside a house in the 700 block of 31st Avenue South. Officers surrounded the home and tried to communicate with the man for several hours, but received no response.

The Dalai Lama addressed thousands today. I narrowly missed getting a free ticket but did manage to run into an old friend I hadn’t seen in a decade as I left Qwest Field. The area was ultra-high security but there was a steady rush to get inside to hear him. I did manage to get a free poster (like in the photo above) from the public library.

He said:

“Many problem essentially are own creation; therefore logically, we must have the ability to eliminate this problem. It is our own interest and responsibility to make this century should be century of dialogue.”

He said the 20th century has become like “century of bloodshed,” and suggested the elimination all nuclear weapons.

“So firstly, on action level, whenever we face problem, different interest, disagreement, the realistic method is nonviolent dialogue. That’s the only way. If you use force in order to solve one problem, it often create lots of unexpected side effect … Nonviolence not just mere absence of violence, nonviolence means facing problem with real determination, vision, wider perspective.”